Google Docs is a great, free tool to create and manage documents on the web, but if you use it a lot you know it can get pretty choked with pages and pages of documents, even if you create collections and folders for those documents to live in. Thankfully, Google has a built-in method to quickly preview an entire collection and all the documents in it at once or individually: just click the drop-down next to the collection name, and select "open."

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This may be old hat to some serious Google Docs users, but I use Docs every day and just stumbled on this trick when the fine folks at The Next Web pointed it out. Instead of clicking on a collection name to open it and see the document list, click the drop-down arrow next to the collection name, select "Open," and you'll be treated to a preview mode of the collection, with a thumbnail of each document on the right and a list of docs on the left.

Better yet, if you want to preview the documents individually, make sure your focus is in that sidebar to the left (click on any empty space) and then use the up and down arrows to bring up the full doc in the window to the right. It's a bit faster than clicking through the list of documents individually, or moving in and out of collections just to preview what's in them. Already know this trick? New to you? Give it a try and let us know what you think in the discussions below.